IMO the biggest drive for sales (coupled with the infamous events) is the belief that there is a “bad expansion → good expansion” cycle. So Shadowlands supposed to be “BfA lessons learned” one.
9.0 was ambiguous, but the problems with story and gameplay were sort of shrugged off, because they were fixable. But 9.1 does not fix a single thing from 9.0, with some beta feedback still being relevant yet ignored. And no lessons from BfA were learned it seems.
So, yeah. Now we only need Arthas to be used as an Anduin boost machine and continue the retcon parade, so that by the end of the expansion even more people would distance themselves from the story and the game in general than after BfA.
And… it’s not available in the game.
It never “had to”. Depends on the execution IMO.
/offtop
Some rambling
Once upon a time on reddit, after the Shadowlands announcement, when the covenants were revealed, I had a conversation on reddit.
There was a person talking about one of side characters. And asked all sorts of question.
“Where would Stasia Fallshadow be?”
“What would she feel if she would met Valeera, who killed her?”
“What could Valeera feel in this meeting?”
“How could Stasia see the events of her life now?”
And so on. And the people arround just said “who cares?” I participated in the discussion as I could, even though I did not know anything about the character before that.
It was a lesson to me, that there is no character too small, or a place not important.
There are people fortunate enough to have fine lives and stable future. But there are also those who among the troubles outside and at home just
try to keep themselves going forward to a hope of maybe better future one day. And then they come back, and see that the last few things that helped them to move on in their lives were thrown away.
It is a lesson that I’m afraid, blizz with their “but these are oh so important characters!!!1” might never get. Or never wish to get.
There is obvously can’t be guarantee that any character will stay forever alive, and all places will stay fine, but there is an implicit contract, that even if it will be taken away, something will be granted back. A good story, a memo, somethinse else.
And it’s totally not what I see in the game. I see that the devs are willing to ruin anything but just for their own biases, without focus on why the players liked those things to begin with, or what is seen as a problem by the players, not the devs.
IMO every character small and big matter to someone. Someone is sad about the destroyed Undercity. Somebody is sad about what was done to Nightwatch. Both are valid. Both are shortsided. And many others fill the similar situation.
gl hf
